Go Directly to . . . Authorship? More on Judge Urbina’s Odd Sentence

If you’ll indulge us, we’d like to circle back to a story that broke earlier in the week that we touched on briefly here. In short, on Monday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., Ricardo Urbina, sentenced a former senior pharmaceutical executive to write a book.

Earlier this year the executive, Dr. Andrew G. Bodnar, a former senior vice president at Bristol-Myers Squibb, had pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the federal government about the company’s efforts to resolve a patent dispute over the blood thinner Plavix.

The judge sentenced Dr. Bodnar to two years of probation during which he is to write a book about his experience connected to the case. Dr. Bodnar must also pay a $5,000 fine.

The NYT story notes that it’s not the first time Judge Urbina has issued an unconventional sentence. In 1998, he sentenced a Washington lobbyist who had pleaded guilty to illegal campaign contributions to write a monograph and distribute it to 2,000 other lobbyists.

But we got to wondering about Urbina’s sentence — whether it has broader historical precedent, whether the punishment is likely . . .